1837
TWICE-TOLD TALES
DR. HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
THAT VERY SINGULAR MAN, old Dr. Heidegger, once invited four
venerable friends to meet him in his study. There were three
white-bearded gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr.
Gascoigne, and a withered gentlewoman, whose name was the Widow
Wycherly. They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been
unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they
were not long ago in their graves. Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of
his age, had been a prosperous merchant, but had lost his all by a
frantic speculation, and was now little better than a mendicant.
Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years, and his health and
substance, in the pursuit of sinful pleasures, which had given birth
to a brood of pains, such as the gout, and divers other torments of
soul and body. Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician, a man of evil
fame, or at least had been so till time had buried him from the
knowledge of the present generation, and made him obscure instead of
infamous.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20